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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product.

I mean, old enough to have Zoomers as children, had I any children, but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install and then nuke the drive with a fresh Bazzite install. It's been a ton of fun to play with, and the best part about it is that it's way more trustworthy to me RN than the unholy mess that is Windows 11 and patch Tuesdays randomly breaking $Important_Thing because all M$ cares about is growing its 365 empire, old and decaying x86-based OS monopoly notwithstanding.

but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install

Last time I changed laptop, I went to great lengths to avoid getting OEM Windows to specifically avoid paying Microsoft, so the first thing I did was plug in a Mint USB.

(The previous time, I'd looked for a no-OS laptop to avoid Win10's anti-user features, but I wasn't willing to go the full order route and the transition costs were enough that if I was paying for Windows anyway I was willing to put up with it. But by the last time, Microsoft had started bankrolling OpenAI, so they're on the hatelist now and I'm willing to pay more to avoid paying them.)

There's a lot to like about Mint, to me it's always been one of the better Ubuntu-based distros! Coming back to a Fedora-based distro after about a decade plus on the other side of that software divide has been an interesting experience, and I've stubbed my toes on various things several different times, but I'm finding that I really dig the underpinnings of Bazzite much more than I expected to. But anyway, IMO Windoze will continue to rule the corporate roost for the foreseeable future since Office is still the de facto standard, but if you don't need that particular ecosystem and are relatively comfortable running a flavor or Linux, then outside of $specific_thing that can't be run/emulated in Linux land, there's absolutely no reason to suffer with M$ any longer.